Pompey ‘the Great’ fake

 

by

Damien F. Mackey

  

Conventional ancient Roman history/chronology needs to be subjected to revisionist scrutiny just as we found to have been the case with ancient Egypt

and the Near East. This article will be a continuation of efforts towards trying to determine whether the seemingly impregnable fortress of conventional

ancient Roman history is firmly based, or if it, too, might be susceptible

to breaches when revisionist pressure is applied.

   

Introduction

 

That the received Roman history may not be as formidably secure as may have been thought I hope that I have demonstrated – without initially having considered it to have been necessary – in articles such as:

 

Rome surprisingly minimal in Bible

 

(11) Rome surprisingly minimal in Bible

 

Horrible Histories. Retracting Romans

 

(12) Horrible Histories. Retracting Romans

 

Jesus Christ was the Model for some legends surrounding Julius Caesar

 

(12) Jesus Christ was the Model for some legends surrounding Julius Caesar

 

Found me arriving at the conclusion that the renowned ‘Julius Caesar’ was largely –

if not entirely – a composite figure, based upon, among others, Jesus Christ;

Alexander the Great; and Octavius (Augustus).

 

Time to consider Hadrian, that ‘mirror-image’ of Antiochus Epiphanes, as also the census emperor Augustus

 

(12) Time to consider Hadrian, that 'mirror-image' of Antiochus Epiphanes, as also the census emperor Augustus

 

Plutarch and Petrarch

 

(12) Plutarch and Petrarch

 

and various other related articles.

 

My revision (based on the efforts of many) has already successfully undertaken some necessary folding of Egyptian and Babylonian history.

For respective examples of this, see my:

 

Egypt’s Old and Middle Kingdoms Far Closer in Time than Conventionally Thought

 

(12) Egypt's Old and Middle Kingdoms far closer in time than conventionally thought

 

and

 

Aligning Neo-Babylonia with the Book of Daniel

 

(12) Aligning Neo-Babylonia with the Book of Daniel

 

Apart from the inestimable benefit of getting rid of those artificial ‘Dark Ages’ – cf. Peter James et al., Centuries of Darkness (1990), being a leader in the field here – such revisionism can serve to make more realistic certain ancient genealogies. For instance, it was found that the conventional Egyptian history, in the case of some detailed genealogies of officials serving a string of named pharaohs, ends up with a whole lot of octogenarian persons, or older, still actively functioning in office.

 

Similarly does the received Roman Imperial chronology create aged but still active characters: e.g. John the Evangelist, in his 90’s (according to a tradition) vigorously chasing a young man on horseback; Yohanan ben Zakkai still going at 120 (highly unlikely), straddling the supposedly two Jewish Revolts.

 

Now, reverting back to the Roman Republican period again, I turn to a brief consideration of Julius Caesar’s supposedly famous contemporary and fellow triumvir, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, or, as we know him better, Pompey ‘the Great’.

 

Is Pompey also a composite?

 

If there is any value in the conclusions that I reached about ‘Julius Caesar’ in my article, “Jesus Christ was the Model for some legends surrounding Julius Caesar”, then that, I believe, must put extreme pressure on the validity of ‘Pompey the Great’ himself, Caesar’s fellow triumvir (along with Crassus).

More especially so as Pompey, too, like Julius Caesar, was (as we shall now learn) likened to Alexander the Great – Pompey perhaps even more explicitly so than Caesar was.

 

Nic Fields tells of it in Warlords of Republican Rome. Caesar versus Pompey (2008, p. 67):

 

Meteoric Rise

 

His flatterers, so it was said, likened Pompey to Alexander the Great, and whether because of this or not, the Macedonian king would appear to have been constantly in his mind. His respect for the fairer sex is comparable with Alexander’s, and Plutarch mentions that when the concubines of Mithridates were brought to him he merely restored them to their parents and families. …. Similarly he treated the corpse of Mithridates in a kingly way, as Alexander treated the corpse of Dareios, and ‘provided for the expenses of the funeral and directed that the remains should receive royal interment’. …. Also, like Alexander, he founded many cities and repaired many damaged towns, searched for the ocean that was thought to surround the world, and rewarded his soldiers munificently. Finally, Appian adds that in his third triumph he was said to have worn ‘a cloak of Alexander the Great’. ….

 

It is interesting to learn that the original name of king Antiochus IV ‘Epiphanes’, who, like Pompey, supposedly, would desecrate the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem, was likewise a “Mithridates”:

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Antiochus_IV_Epiphanes

 

Nic Fields again on p. 98:

 

In a sense Pompey personified Roman imperialism, where absolute destruction was followed by the construction of stable empire and the rule of law. It also, not coincidentally, raised him to a pinnacle of glory and wealth. The client–rulers who swelled the train of Rome also swelled his own. He received extraordinary honours from the communities of the east, as ‘saviour and benefactor of the People and of all Asia, guardian of land and sea’. …. There was an obvious precedent for all this. As the elder Pliny later wrote, Pompey’s victories ‘equalled in brilliance the exploits of Alexander the Great’. Without a doubt, so Pliny continues, the proudest boast of our ‘Roman Alexander’ would be that ‘he found Asia on the rim of Rome’s possessions, and left it in the centre’. ….

 

Pompey is even supposed to have gone so far as to have tried to emulate Alexander’s distinctive appearance:

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/miscellanea/cleopatra/pompey.html

 

The marble bust of Pompey is in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen). Its somewhat incongruous appearance, the round face and small lidded eyes beneath the leonine mane of hair, is because Pompey, the most powerful Roman of his day, sought a comparison with Alexander the Great, whose distinctive portraits were characterized by a thoughtful facial expression and, more iconographically, locks of hair brushed back high from the forehead, a stylistic form known as anastole, from the Greek “to put back.”

 

Did Pompey absorb – like I have argued may have been the case with Julius Caesar – not only Alexander-like characteristics, but also general Hellenistic ones?

 

And might that mean that the famous event of Pompey’s desecration (by his presence therein) of the Temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem, supposedly in 63 BC:

http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/12264-pompey-the-great

 

The capture of the Temple mount was accompanied by great slaughter. The priests who were officiating despite the battle were massacred by the Roman soldiers, and many committed suicide; while 12,000 people besides were killed.

 

 

Pompey himself entered the Temple, but he was so awed by its sanctity that he left the treasure and the costly vessels untouched (“Ant.” xiv. 4, § 4; “B. J.” i. 7, § 6; Cicero, “Pro Flacco,” § 67). The leaders of the war party were executed, and the city and country were laid under tribute. A deadly blow was struck at the Jews when Pompey separated from Judea the coast cities from Raphia to Dora, as well as all the Hellenic cities in the east-Jordan country, and the so-called Decapolis, besides Scythopolis and Samaria, all of which were incorporated in the new province of Syria. ….

 

may in fact be a muddled version of that real historical incident when king Antiochus (Mithridates) ‘Epiphanes’ most infamously desecrated the holy Temple in Jerusalem (2 Maccabees 5:15-18).

 

Republic spilling into Empire

 

 

What a complete mess is conventional ancient history!

Kingdoms, dynasties and rulers duplicated, or triplicated.

History and culture having a “strange afterglow” centuries later. 

Impossible “Dark Ages” procrusteanising time periods by extension. 

BC characters and events mysteriously projected into AD 'time’. 

And, in this case, the Roman Republic flopping over into its Empire.

 

Dolly Parton put it well: “It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it” (9 to 5).

 

 

There is that strange re-duplication, about 60 years later, of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome.

 

But it seems that the history books also ‘know’ of a ‘third’ bloody capture of Jerusalem in Roman history - one which is thought, however, to have preceded the other supposedly two assaults by Rome in the Neronic and Hadrianic (so-called) imperial eras. It is considered to have occurred in Republican times, in 63 BC, when Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey ‘the Great’), one time ally of Julius Caesar, captured Jerusalem and killed 12,000 Jews.

 

This is quite a massive event, to say the least, yet it is often mentioned only in passing.

 

Strange that it is nowhere referred to in the Bible.

 

Hence, I suspect that there also needs to be a folding of some Roman Republican history with early Roman Imperial history. There was, for example:

 

(i)  a Pompey the Great (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus) also at the time of Caligula (see A. Barrett, Caligula - the Corruption of Power, p. 237) about a century after (presumably) the Republican Pompey. And there was then also a

 

(ii)    Marcus Crassus; the same name as the ‘earlier’ Pompey’s fellow consul (see Mackay, p. 135). Moreover, Caligula may have been murdered by a

 

(iii)  Cassius Longinus (Barrett, p. 162); the same name as the chief conspirator against Julius Caesar.

 

All very strange indeed and desperately needing to be explained. ….

 

 

Claim that Copernicus knew of Aristarchus

 

“… with some reading and piecing together of some related bits of evidence,

and thinking about context, I’m now completely convinced Copernicus

did know of Aristarchus’s hypothesis, and that he deliberately withheld acknowledgement of the fact”.

cosmiCave.org

  

Taken from: Setting the Record Straight: How Copernicus Concealed His Debt to Aristarchus—and Claimed an Intellectual Priority He Knew Wasn’t His – cosmiCave.org

 

Setting the Record Straight: How Copernicus Concealed His Debt to Aristarchus—and Claimed an Intellectual Priority He Knew Wasn’t His

 

There’s a prevailing myth in the history of science that Copernicus rediscovered heliocentrism independently—and that he had no real connection to Aristarchus, whose own theory was vague, obscure, and uninfluential. This essay dismantles that myth.

 

While researching this previous essay, trying to get all my facts straight with reference to primary sources, I found several interconnected things that are badly misunderstood at the present—things I previously thought were true, but which closer inspection showed to be false.

 

I used to think, as it’s the common consensus, that it was unclear whether Nicolaus Copernicus had known Aristarchus of Samos proposed a heliocentric (Sun-centred) model similar to his in the third century BCE—and that he probably didn’t since he never mentioned it. But with some reading and piecing together of some related bits of evidence, and thinking about context, I’m now completely convinced Copernicus did know of Aristarchus’s hypothesis, and that he deliberately withheld acknowledgement of the fact.

 

Another thing I’ve always understood to be true, which is written all over the place, is that one of the main obstacles that stood against Aristarchus’s theory being accepted in his time was the fact that we don’t see any stellar parallax in nearby stars as Earth orbits the Sun. But this, too, turns out to be an anachronistic myth—and one that’s pretty clear to see when all the relevant information is pulled together. It’s also linked to a lot of inaccuracy related to interpreting Copernicus and Aristarchus, and in a way I think it has indirectly influenced the false consensus that Copernicus likely wasn’t aware of Aristarchus’s hypothesis.

 

Consequently, while this essay’s primary purpose is to explain that Copernicus was, without a doubt, aware of Aristarchus’s heliocentric theory—in fact, he was every bit as aware of its details as anyone today is—it will also clarify some other things that people seem to commonly misunderstand, such as the anachronistic parallax myth.

 

I want to be clear: I’m not claiming Copernicus originally got the heliocentric idea directly from Aristarchus. That is too strong a claim, and I don’t think we can ever know one way or the other. Aristarchus likely became known to Copernicus at some influential point during his studies in Italy, but whether that was before or after Copernicus had thought of the basic concept, and realised for himself that e.g. retrograde motion could be explained through parallax rather than by actual backwards motion as the planets looped around a fixed Earth, we cannot know. It is reasonable to think that Copernicus realised the latter on his own, though he did not keep a detailed diary as he worked through his ideas, so we can’t confirm this.

 

So we can’t know precisely when in his early years Copernicus became aware of Aristarchus, nor how influential the Ancient Greek had been in shaping Copernicus’s theory.

 

In fact, very little is even known of the details of Aristarchus’s model, so it really can’t have been too influential. Copernicus must have come to realise much of what makes the concept so compelling on his own.

 

But still, this does not change the fact that Copernicus did Aristarchus dirty.

 

He knew Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric theory in the third century BCE. He knew Aristarchus was a serious astronomer, e.g. the first to estimate the Sun’s distance through careful measurement and detailed geometric reasoning. And Copernicus deliberately withheld that information from both Commentariolus and De revolutionibus orbium coelestium—as he was absolutely aware of his predecessor’s theory already when he wrote his early draft.

 

This much is true. And it is also true that Copernicus made this omission so he could claim priority to the idea that the Earth orbits the Sun.

 

While he did not explicitly say this—how could he, as he omitted his knowledge of Aristarchus entirely?—he did so implicitly, by excluding Aristarchus from the broader group of Ancient geokineticists he listed in support of his proposal that the Earth moves, which he followed by explicitly claiming that he had come to the idea that Earth is orbiting the Sun on his own, “by long and intense study.”

 

Leaving Aristarchus out of that sequence worked well rhetorically, as he could cite precedent for the proposal that the Earth spins daily, or that it moves about a central fire in an abstract, metaphorical sense. And from there, Copernicus could frame himself as taking those ideas to the next level with a novel hypothesis that this moving Earth actually orbits the Sun. 

 

The omission of Aristarchus provided a clean and compelling narrative within the opening argument for his life’s work, and it’s understandable that he did it.

 

The alternative would be to frame the whole theory as something that had basically been thought of and explored in Ancient times, and eventually rejected by those who Copernicus and everyone around him thought of as intellectual authorities, leaving him to argue that while they’d eventually abandoned the idea he nevertheless proposed circling back to.

 

This more honest approach would have placed Copernicus at a much greater disadvantage, making him far more easily dismissed on superficial grounds, which he needed to avoid. “Check out my theory! Someone already thought of it 1800 years ago and the astronomers at the time eventually dismissed it as an abstract peculiarity that’s nevertheless absurd. But for the past several decades I’ve worked through the details anyway and I think I can make it work, never minding the absurdity which you’re likely to find insane.”

 

Copernicus actually acknowledged in De revolutionibus, that the idea that Earth was rapidly spinning and orbiting as he proposed seemed “absurd,” “insane,” and “almost against common sense.” To admit this, and to also say that people had nevertheless already considered the hypothesis and discarded it would have considerably heightened his disadvantage.

 

So, instead, he omitted the detail and framed the idea as novel: 

 

“For a long time, then, I reflected on this confusion in the astronomical traditions concerning the derivation of the motions of the universe’s spheres … having obtained the opportunity from these sources, I too began to consider the mobility of the earth. And even though the idea seemed absurd, nevertheless I knew that others before me had been granted the freedom to imagine any circles whatever for the purpose of explaining the heavenly phenomena.

 

Hence I thought that I too would be readily permitted to ascertain whether explanations sounder than those of my predecessors could be found for the revolution of the celestial spheres on the assumption of some motion of the earth … [and] by long and intense study I finally found that if the motions of the other planets are correlated with the orbiting of the earth …”.

 

So you see: this narrative does not work if Copernicus acknowledges that Aristarchus had actually beaten him to the claim, and that Copernicus was reviving something that had been rejected almost two thousand years ago, by those who had the full original manuscript to work with. Omitting Aristarchus allowed Copernicus to cast himself as the innovator rather than revivalist—to frame heliocentrism as a novel hypothesis rather than a return to an abandoned theory.

 

Copernicus’s source on Aristrarchus’s theory—Archimedes’ Sand-Reckoner—was also not widely known when De revolutionibus was published in 1543. It was first printed (purely coincidentally?) in a Latin edition of Archimedes’ works in 1544. Copernicus was therefore not compelled to cite his source, as his knowledge of the former work was relatively private and not expected.

 

Anyway, the above explains roughly why I think Copernicus cut Aristarchus out.

 

This is my reasoning based on Copernicus’s rhetorical framing of his proposal, and a suspicion that he was not acting purely in bad faith. Not necessarily because he wanted all the glory to himself, though there may have been some of that, but mainly because it would have been a disadvantage to do so.

 

But this essay is not about my own, personal speculative opinion. And I will not go so far as to demonstrate why Copernicus did what he did, nor how large a debt Copernicus owed to Aristarchus nor how much of his realisation about the compelling aspects of heliocentrism was original insight. I don’t think we’ll ever find more direct evidence to help in ascertaining these things.

 

What I will show, as I said above, is that Copernicus clearly, unquestionably did read Archimedes’ Sand-Reckoner sometime before 1514, when he circulated Commentariolus to his friends and colleagues—and that he therefore knew Aristarchus proposed a heliocentric theory before him. That he therefore deliberately withheld the reference in De revolutionibus. And that twentieth century Copernicus historians wrongly concluded he did not.

 

In the process, I’ll also set the record straight on a related point—a common anachronistic reading of the evidence that was held against heliocentrism, both in Ancient times and in Copernicus’s day. The idea that the Ancients cited an apparent asbsence of parallax shift in the nearest stars due to Earth’s hypothesised orbit about the Sun, that they favoured geocentrism in part because of this, and that Copernicus hedged against this criticism, is a complete falsehood that is almost universally accepted at present.

 

This anachronistic parallax argument against heliocentrism was not noted until after Copernicus died—and in fact it was not even applicable to either his theory or Aristarchus’s. The fact that it is commonly thought to have concerned Copernicus and Aristarchus’s contemporaries is unfortunate for several reasons: 

 

• it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of an Ancient worldview that persisted unchallenged until nearly the end of the sixteenth century, which Copernicus never dreamed of questioning; 
• it therefore obscures the debt we all owe to one of the most influential innovations in the history of cosmology, to a person (Thomas Digges) whose name is hardly ever even mentioned in the history books—and certainly not as a key player in the Scientific Revolution—who frankly deserves to be celebrated as the father of modern cosmology, finally given his rightful place alongside Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton;
• it leads to anachronistic misreadings of both Ptolemy and Copernicus, when we fail to realise the notion of a parallax shift in nearby stars relative to those further away never could have crossed their minds; and,
• it obscures a key piece of evidence that renders Copernicus’s obvious plagiarism of Archimedes unmistakable, along with the deliberateness of his omission of Aristarchus as his predecessor.

 

It’s an interesting and deeply illuminating historiographic reset, and I hope you enjoy reading. It’s far more than just a detail about intellectual credit. These false narratives that have been propagating for more than a century warp our entire understanding of cosmological progress, Ancient science’s sophistication, and even modern assumptions about scientific reasoning.

 

Given everything I’ve said above, I’ll work through the actual demonstration of claims as follows. I’m going to start with a recap of previous arguments that incorrectly concluded Copernicus was unaware of Aristarchus’s heliocentric theory, clarifying on their own terms how weak and flawed they are. I’ll then explain the anachronistic parallax argument, clarifying why it is an anachronism. With that context, we can then immediately clarify Archimedes’ reference to Aristarchus in the Sand-Reckoner—both, what his concerns were and what they were not. I’ll then also discuss both Ptolemy’s argument in Almagest Book I, Chapter 6 and Copernicus’s argument in De revolutionibus Book I, Chapter 6 (Copernicus deliberately paralleled the structure of Almagest as a rhetorical device in his work, so these chapters are similar), clearly establishing that neither was aware of the anachronistic parallax idea. Thus, we’ll clarify both, that Ptolemy was not arguing against heliocentrism on that ground—in fact, there is no evidence he entertained the heliocentric hypothesis at all in Almagest, as he never addressed it—and that Copernicus was not hedging against the anachronistic parallax argument in De revolutionibus—and again, there’s no evidence he ever even dreamed it was a problem he’d need to guard against—and in fact when we consider his actual worldview it’s clear the problem should never have crossed his mind. 

 

We’ll then loop back to the Sand-Reckoner, specifically focusing on Archimedes’ application of Aristarchus’s theory, what that application says and what it explicitly does not imply about the Ancient reasons it failed to attract a wider following. In my previous essay, I gave three reasons why Aristarchus’s theory faded into obscurity until it was revived by Copernicus, and this diagnosis clarifies that the anachronistic parallax argument was never one of them—that it was never even dreamed of until after 1576, when Digges proposed his radically different cosmological worldview, which we’ve all come to accept implicitly, and tend to project onto earlier thinkers.

 

Finally, having all these pieces in place, this analysis will close with the evidence that Copernicus lifted his fourth proposition in Commentariolus directly from Archimedes—that there is no other explanation for the specific formulation he chose, as he never would have come to that specific formulation on his own, he did not require it, he never made specific use of it, and in the end, in De revolutionibus he reverted to the less specific, mathematically imprecise argument that paralleled Ptolemy’s reasoning in the Almagest.

 

Previous Accounts by Science Historians

 

Copernicus’s Commentariolus was lost for more than 350 years. While he had shared copies privately with several friends and colleagues in 1514, those languished in private libraries. This first articulation of Copernicus’s heliocentric hypothesis was only rediscovered in 1878, by the historian Maximilian Curtze in Vienna. And it was first translated into English by Edward Rosen in 1939.

 

In 1942, Rudolf von Erhardt and Erika von Erhardt-Siebold published a sprawling article in the History of Science journal Isis, closing with a claim about “the almost certain acquaintance of Copernicus with the Sand-Reckoner.” In the article, this claim was buried at the end, and even there it was not well explained: The section is two paragraphs long, the point is made (without proper context) that Copernicus’s fourth postulate in Commentariolus is conspicuously similar in its construction to a passage from the Sand-Reckoner, and then the authors proceed to speculate—incorrectly!—that with this postulate Copernicus may have been guarding against the non-observability of stellar parallax due to Earth’s orbit. ….

 

 

 

In the context of all of this, and regarding the actual historicity of some of these famous astronomers and scientists, see my (Damien Mackey’s) articles:

 

Did the Greeks derive their Archimedes from Sargon II’s Akhimiti?

 

(8) Did the Greeks derive their Archimedes from Sargon II's Akhimiti?

 

Machiavelli in the name Achitophel, Galileo Galilei in the name Gamaliel

 

(8) Machiavelli in the name Achitophel, Galileo Galilei in the name Gamaliel